Wednesday, December 3, 2014

THE FLEISCHMANN SINGULARITY

A PAPER by RUSS GEORGE

Pons and Fleischmann created a singularity in 1988

Some few years ago (2006) I was sitting in Martin Fleischmann’s parlour in the South of England. He had invited me to come chat with him about my work which at the time was going on under the banner of my company D2Fusion. I spent a long afternoon with Martin talking over the history of cold fusion and his search for gentle energy. One particular story I was keen to hear was of the melting event in the lab in Utah that was shrouded in mystery. Over time I have come to think that mysterious event was the creation of a what must be named a ‘Fleischmann singularity’.

As Martin told me the story he and Stan had been conducting many electrochemical loading experiments with heavy water and palladium. One long running experiment was with a largish cube of palladium, as I recall about a 1 cm cube. It had been sitting for a very long time, months, in the typical electrolysis bath of heavy water into which a bit of lithium had been introduced to help the electrolyte. It was one of those experiments that explorers often have on the ‘back of the bench’ to watch over a long time frame.

Pons and Fleischmann showing their lab to a group of school kids in 1989

As it happened over a weekend where Stan and Martin were not going to be around the lab Stan’s son was tasked with peeking in on the lab to make sure all was in order. When he did so he saw that the cube experiment lay shattered and broken on the lab bench and in the bench was a hole as if something had burned through it from the experiment. Stan’s son telephoned to report the news and Stan and Martin sprang into action to see what might have happened.

When they examined the lab bench and remains of the experiment they noted that indeed something had not only burned it’s way through the bench but had also burned down and out of sight into the concrete floor of the basement lab. The basement lab was in the large chemistry building with a massive concrete foundation at the University of Utah where Professor Pons was the chair of the department.

In 1979 the movie China Syndrome told of a nuclear melting event where the core melts down into the earth

Much was done to try to get to the bottom of what happened and no explanation could be arrived at save that the palladium had become and sustained being impossibly hot and produced a mini ‘China Syndrome’ event. Mysteriously the palladium was gone.

What happened next?

The conditions of the experiment were seemingly quite benign. A tiny amount of DC current amounting a 1 watt or so was being used to electrolyse the heavy water. Oxygen was being produced and bubbled up at the platinum anode and deuterium, heavy hydrogen, bubbled at the palladium cathode cube. Palladium being a sponge for hydrogen was also soaking up the deuterium and that palladium cathode may have been holding as many atoms of deuterium as there were palladium atoms. This was Fleischmann’s perfect recipe for cold fusion.

Martin noted that the measure of the density (fugacity) of the heavy hydrogen isotope deuterium electrochemically loaded into palladium surely exceeded that of metallic hydrogen. Indeed he mused to me the calculations based on his measurements put the density of that heavy hydrogen as being well beyond metallic and similar to the density of hydrogen inside the center of a star!

Prof. Stanley Pons in his cold fusion lab at University of Utah 1989

Stan Pons, then chairman of the chemistry department at Utah was a former graduate student of Fleischmann’s. As Martin told me he recently had moved from his active career as a professor of chemistry to professor emeritus at the University of South Hampton in England and could now, without risking his retirement, take on some of the more out of the box lines of research that he’d been secretly investigating for decades. Stan was more than willing to be his partner in this pioneering and courageous work.

Martin told me he had first glimpsed cold fusion in his reading about hydrogen in metals in 1949 and long thereafter had been on the trail that he noted tracked even further back into the 1930’s. But these ideas were so out of the box of traditional scientific dogma it was just too hot to handle while upholding the duties of a prominent teaching professor.

Beyond Cold Fusion

I asked Martin whether he had tried to repeat the palladium cube melt down experiment. His reply was a dramatic and emphatic NO, he said he thought it far too dangerous to do so. He figured they got away with it once without dire consequences — a second time they might not be so lucky. Just what it was that destroyed that experiment he noted “was perhaps even beyond than cold fusion.”The energy required to do the damage they observed was simply beyond anything they could imagine. It was surely nuclear if not beyond so. Fleischmann and Pons dutifully informed nuclear authorities and were flummoxed when they were simply dismissed as reporting the impossible. ‘Fools’ is what Martin called them.

Martin and Stan did continue on their much smaller scale experiments with tiny palladium cathodes that were typically about 1 cm long and the diameter of a toothpick. These were producing reliable anomalous heat that was far beyond any conceivable chemical energy source. Eventually they were able to produce boiling cells that would sustain boiling temperatures for weeks on end and even continue long after the electrolyzing current was shut off!

This is what they reported in their March 1989 press conference, watch a short video below, that started the world on a long path toward cold fusion energy.

4 comments:

Please permit me to speculate on the mechanism involved in the F&P meltdown.

The palladium melted. Therefore, the temperature reached at least 1554C. Even more impressive, part of the palladium cube vaporized. The temperature reached more than 3000C. In addition, a hole was excavated in the concrete floor. The sand must have been vaporized. That means that the silicon vaporized at a temperature of 3265C. This vaporization temperature is greater than the melting point(1554C) of palladium and the vaporization point of palladium(3000C). Since only a part of the palladium(1CC) was vaporized, this tells me that the reaction was carried primarily in the silicon within the concrete since most of the mass loss was in the concrete. Also, the iron rebar was vaporized at 2862C. The palladium cube arrived at a position inside the concrete crater where the temperature was relatively cool to keep from totally vaporizing under the heat produced by the silicon plasma.

The reaction started on the surface of the palladium cube after a long period of surface pitting was generated by long term low level electric arcing. Mizuno uses electric arcing to prepare his LENR active surfaces. Over the months, the surface of the palladium cube reached a critical level of LENR surface preparation to carry a LENR reaction to a point were a positive feedback took hold producing a plasma where the reaction became self sustaining and than gainful.

The plasma carried by the palladium cube eventually burned through the lab table(Melamine?) and hit the floor. The reaction they transferred to the silicon in the concrete where it formed nano-particles when the silicon plasma cooled. These nano-particles carried the LENR reaction. The hydrogen loaded in the palladium was long gone after the palladium melted and partially vaporized and could not be the energy source for the reaction during the final high temperature phase of the meltdown event when the concrete began to burn and vaporize..